Rick Moran has the definitive post up on this latest ‘study’, which incidentally was conducted by the same group who conducted the last controversial Iraq civilian death count study, which claimed that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the start of the Iraq war. That study, I should note and as Rick pointed out, was also released shortly before an election: October 29, 2004. This latest study is highly dubious, as Rick points out with various links, so treat the media hype for what it is: an October surprise.

I question the timing. And, apparently, so does the Associated Press. A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates. The timing of the survey’s release,…

So, just out of curiosity, how many dead Iraqis do YOU think there are? And how many Iraqis do you think need to die before you give serious consideration as to whether this administration really has a clue what’s going on?

Burnham dontated $750 to his buddy, Les Roberts, in 2005 and 2006. You see, Les Roberts rain the the democratic primary. Birds of a feather, campaign together by releasing “studies” to get democrats elected.

I think the Civil War was a success Mark because the United States is united and the issues were resolved. The carnage and death is surely unfortunate but was never a reason to end the war. I’m glad we had leaders back then and not Mark Gisleson’s

Same for that matter with WW2. And guess what? There were 3 week periods in WW2 with more American casualties than the 3 year Iraq war. You guys desperately lack perspective and attack based on false premises everyday. Is that a pattern you like about yourself?

This is just getting ridiculous. What’s said is the unbalance in the NY Times article make the AP’s article seem fair, though the fact that it’s pumping the story so heavily and without many comments from contradicting surveys makes their…

longz again:So if, say, 30 million people died, you think you could still call the war a success?

Depends on whether the objectives were achieved. Especially since you’re counting enemy casualties in with the friendlies.

Since you’re apparently big on putting numbers on this topic, maybe you can tell us how many combined casualties you’d accept in a war before you surrender. Since the low figure for this admittedly-biased “study” is 426,369, you’ll have to come up with a lower number than that.

Let’s call it your “cut-and-run” threshold. I’d like to hear at what point your will to win evaporates.

This thread, more than any recently, aptly defines the differences between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats.

Conservative: Kim deliberately lied in continuing to pursue nuclear weapons after the framework was signed. He never intended to comply, and Carter/Clinton were idiots if they thought he would, and stupid for not including uranium in the mix, they should have expected this kind of shell game.

Liberal: Carter and Clinton were geniuses. Kim is not in violation of anything, it’s perfectly OK for him to enrich uranium as we didn’t have an agreement with him not to technically. Besides, if it wasn’t for Bush not talking with him things would still be rosey!

What do you expect from a party that attempts to differentiate between Abramoff giving money to someone and him telling his clients to give money to someone. This is the same kind of hypercritical and nitpicking parsing we got when they shrieked “Abramoff never gave money to Democrats.” This is what you get when you have a collection of people used to trying to use the exact letter of the law and such rationalizations to justify their being able to do whatever they want without consequences. It’s like watching a 6 year old try and argue about bedtime, it’s not 9 o’clock. No it’s later. But it’s NOT 9! This comes from people who want to justify their behavior and not get punished for wrongdoing. I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman, yada yada yada. People who believe the rules apply to anyone but them.

These people will be arguing semantic nits in fallout shelters still trying to justify Kim’s actions. If ever there were proof that the liberals and Democrats are to unserious to ever be trusted with the affairs of this country this is it.

Research has discovered that there have been over 650, 000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the United States of America invaded Iraq in 2003 as reported on al-Jazeera,
“We estimate that as of July 2006, there have been 654, 965… excess Iraqi …

But you threw that figure out in a general sense, longz, and only added on “in the Iraq war” after the fact. IOW, you were shifting gears. I’m happy to know that you don’t consider WWII a failure. That’s one thing you’ve gotten right today

Now just where in there did I assert losing 30 million in Iraq would constitute success? I made a general statement applying to wars in general, stating that I didn’t measure the success or failure of A war in terms of the casualty rate, you responded in general (or so I thought), then added on the Iraq bit afterwards, and are now spinning this into me supporting that high a casualty rate in Iraq if that’s what it takes. Simply amazing.

BTW, I made a couple of booboos in a prior response that I’d like to correct (correction in bold):

You: “So if, say, 30 million people died, you think you could still call the war a success?”

ST: “Yes, but it appears you wouldn’t. Perhaps you consider WWII a failure?”

—

I mistakenly thought you’d said “failure” where you actually said “success.” I think you understood what I meant, but others just joining in may not have.

Fine, then, Sister. So contrary to your first statement, it now turns out that you do measure the success or failure of a war in terms of casualties.

In the case of the Iraq war, your figure apparently is somewhere between 660,000 and 30 million. So where would you say it crosses the line? When it’s more than double the number that Saddam killed? Triple? Tenfold?

Sort of brings back that quote from Vietnam, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Except that was never said. Peter Arnett (you might remember him as Saddam’s cherrleader during both Gulf Wars) made it up:

Remember the phrase “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”? It has become totemic. Arnett was the originator of the phrase. The trouble is, as first B.G. Burkett and then I discovered after a little investigation, the report was wrong. It wasn’t the U.S. that destroyed Ben Tre, (a town, not a village) but the Vietcong. And the soldier Arnett was most likely quoting remembers saying “It was a shame the town was destroyed,” not the fatuity Arnett made famous.

But since when has accuracy been important to the leftists when they can accuse America?

By the way, longz, we’re still waiting to hear your cut-and-run threshold…care to answer that?

I’m getting really tired of you misrepresenting what I say. My statement contradicted nothing I said earlier. I do NOT measure a war’s success or failure based on casualty rates. A LOT of things factor in, but unfortunately for the left the only thing that seems to factor in is casualties, which is why you guys are so obsessed with the number of troop and civilian deaths.

Please stop misrepresenting what I say. You seem like an intelligent person, so I know you can do better.

Longz without reading comprehension wrote, “it now turns out that you do measure the success or failure of a war in terms of casualties.”

Everybody including ST has been saying to you that they don’t measure the success of a war based on casualties. ONLY YOU LONGZ.

The problem with the CLAIM is that 660,000 is off AND you can’t read and comprehend. You need to study this conversation thread for a few days it seems and get back to us with an apology for misstating what we have said. That’s my personal opinion.

Sticking to the same illogical argument won’t help here. We are about clarity. Apparently you are about misinformation.

Casualty rate, particularly the other sides, is a poor way of judging success. As I said, if you kill all of them, then the original problem is definitely solved. The US tries too hard to limit civilian casualties, to the point of negatively impacting military operations and increasing our casualty rate. One of the major problems in Iraq, one which wasn’t as big an issue in WWII, is that the civilian population hasn’t suffered enough. People tend not to whine as much about this or that if they are just glad to be alive, after Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Regensburg, and Tokyo, the civilians were much more tractable and easier to manage then the Iraqi’s are because they were much happier that it was just all finally over. Might be an ugly truth, but truth it is.

The very most basic, elementary principle of warfare is that the force used be proportionate to the goal and that civilian casualties also be proportionate to the goal. That isn’t liberal-speak; that’s West Point, day one.

For all of you to type on your keyboards that the number of casualties makes no difference to you at all in whether you consider the war a success, this means you don’t understand anything about war at all. But nice to know some of you would applaud genocide if we committed it.

Full of attacks he is. Thank you ST. Same old liberal attack/accuse pattern.

Yet WW2 or Civil War or WW1 wasn’t a failure. Why? Because while the deaths were a tragedy, good overcame evil and the objective was achieved. I would not want us to have stopped or say we surrender during those wars because America would be WAY different.

“The very most basic, elementary principle of warfare is that the force used be proportionate to the goal and that civilian casualties also be proportionate to the goal. That isn’t liberal-speak; that’s West Point, day one.”

Which is probably why we didn’t nuke any cities. It’s also probably why we didn’t carpet bomb cities at random.

You really have no clue as to what warfare is about, or what is really going on over there, longz.
Just keep living in your little fantasy world where the U.S. is the great evil and there would be peace if it were’nt for the U.S. You and Jimmy Carter belong in a league of your own……and you are.

The very most basic, elementary principle of warfare is that the force used be proportionate to the goal and that civilian casualties also be proportionate to the goal. That isn’t liberal-speak; that’s West Point, day one.

War as practiced by modern Western militaries, don’t assume it’s a military golden rule. It hasn’t been practiced that way by most military leaders throughout history, and only the staggeringly efficient and accurate modern weapons allows us to even consider such an approach today. When you can destroy a hardened target with one or two smart bombs, you can afford to be picky about collateral damage and casualties. If you don’t have the ability to destroy the target without damaging the surroundings and killing civilians, that does not make that target suddenly unimportant or immune from attack. Sucks, but that’s the way it is. Honorable, modern democracies worry about civilian casualties, on both sides, brutal dictators don’t care, which is why sanctions seldom work against rogue regimes, they care nothing about their people, only their leaders power. Eventually you will reach a point where you can’t afford to be so picky. We are too picky now, I’d not willingly trade the life of one of our servicemen for 1000 collateral civilian casualties.

You know, I can read about this, and understand why so many decent conservatives are abandoning Bush these days: SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a…

This is a lie, show us the proof, how bout counting the Iranians, Jordanians, Egyptians, ect. but the number is impossible, that be over 770 a day .. get real Bush hating death toll counter, what side are you on, come on, tell us.

– I think I see the discrepancy here, and it’s an easy mistake to make, particularly if your a partisan unhinged Bush hater that would do or say anything to win an election, any election at this point.

– The descrepancy is that the Liberal lap dog press and SP’s like longz are lumping in the piles of mass graves uncovered since the days of Hussein. If you subtract those out, some graves with as many as 4000+ bodies, knowing how long it went on and on, the 400,000 figure doesn’t leave enough to count the few that we’ve been responsiple for in the war.

– Besides the usual strawman I think it will be shown eventually, that 95% or more of the civilian deaths have either been at the hand of one insurgency group or another, or the intercine killing of the Iraqi’s themselves.

– But it looks better for the moonbat cause to blame EVERYTHING on us. BS.

– BTW, I love when the lap dog media tries these sorts of stunts. After they get totally trashed, and made to look like the partisan hacks they are, it just hurts the Lefts cause yet again. So keep it coming SP’s.

The left continues to believe that if there is a survey or a poll it must be the truth. They do not even question the thought that if we killed over 2% of the population of Iraq, that we would be hard pressed not to have the world community comind down on us for a real reason. How stupid is that??? Yes George Bush killed 2 percent the population of Iraq, where the hell would the UN be on that situation??? I would back the UN in an investigation of this. Like I said, I question the METHOD of this poll. Ask 12,000 families in Baghdad and Falujah and you will factor these kinds of numbers. I have to wonder how many Kurds were questioned, you know that place in Iraq that is fairly peaceful, that you NEVER hear about in the news.

Mark, I don’t actually know how many dead Iraqi’s there are. Are we including Iraqi’s who are fighting against us, or civilians or foreign fighters that pollsters like to call “Iraqis”?? LOL The sheer stupidity of thinking that in the hunt for what 5000 terrorists, we needed to kill 655,000 civilians only proves that most people on the left are idiotic reactionary fools.

Longz, you lost it the minute you brought in the 30 million population number. You see the wonderful leftists in this country who like communism, have NO problem with the 30 million that Stalin killed. Grow up man, your argument was immature and childish at best, and if you purposely believe the garbage you are arguing, you only prove that you are one of those reactionary fools. Good luck in this life because you are seriously going to need luck, cuz you ain’t got much else. – Lorica

– brad I don’t care who it was….making such an ignoramous statement may get you your 15 minutes of pity-pot attention, but you’re doomed if you try to jump on that bandwagon. Try using a little common sense for once, it must get awfully tiresome being laughed at and ridiculed all the time.

I didn’t really need to do it, we’ve all been down this “Liberal fairy-tales” path countless times before, but I took a glance at the link Bak provided just to see what sort of numbskull thinking went into this “study”.

Here’s the money quote:

Extrapolated across the country, 654,965 premature deaths – 2.5 per cent of the population – have occurred since March 2003, the study said.

– Based on that, I want you brad, to think about that for a moment. Say you wanted to determine how many people died of choking on chicken bones a year. So you go to the local emergency ward, and interview all the patients, and on duty nurses, a total of 20 people at the time, and you find 1 person that actually died from that cause in the past three years. Fine. the problem comes from the “extrapulation” part.

– Lets say you don’t have the resources to do any more investigating, or for various reasons, such as not wanting to get kidnapped and have you head cutoff, as is the case in Iraq, you decide just to “extrapulate” your findings across America. So you say: “Well, I have an average of 1 person in 20, dying of “chicken-choke” soooooooo, lets see, 300 million people in America, divided by 20….. My goodness, I had know idea….that’s….that’s 15 million people….KFC’s operation is a MONSTEROUS killing machine…..

– See the problem? that should even be easy enough for a Liberal to understand.

– It’s even worse for your cause when things like this happen, and it’s clear to everyone you’re doing it for partisan reasons, and to market lies, because you lose the one thing you can’t buy with the people. Trust. the Liberal pandering media will learn that lesson when it’s too late, and they’re just an ugly memmory.

brad….of course I left out details, do you think if I would have included the fact it was over 3 years, and that the annual death rate from chicken bones was actually out of 3000 emergency patients a year, I would have arrived at an accurate figure if I still extrapulated….because if you do you still would have 33,333 people dying of “bone-itus” a year, and I’m sure KFC sales would plummit.

– The whole thing, as it stands, is rediculous on the face of it, and yes I would be interested in an accurate study, particularly if it did a comparison of accidental deaths during combat, versus all others from suicide bombers, and sectarian cross fighting, and all the other reasons, not by american soldiers. I would be very interested. A little birdy is telling me, unless it hurts Bush in some way, I won’t be seeing that sort of stuidy very soon.

Bang: Its not that you left out details. It’s that 20 is the wrong number to divide by. Thats not what you’re extrapoliting from: 1 death in 20. But 1 death from all the people who would go to that hospital over the course of 3 years.

I think you should in the future stop using numbers and just rely on calling other people stupid.

Lorica had the money quote. Thank you Lorica. The average leftist dolt on the street thinks now that we’ve killed or that we + insurgents have killed 655,000 Iraqi civilians. Why? Because leftism has a problem with reality. Clarity is the enemy of the left. So is perspective…..

They interviewed 1,840 random people and found over 500 dead (92% of those showed the death certificate). And if you think about they clearly couldn’t interview at homes that don’t exist anymoreâ€¦so 1 dead for every 4 randomly selected home. That’s bad no matter how you look at it.

Yes, the study is the best look at Iraqi deaths, bar none. Iraq Body Count, which only counts *civilian* deaths, and only those caused by violence, and *only* those reported in the local media, does not count many of the deaths this study would catch.

Engineer:
The study is on Lancet; please read it.

They only asked for death certificates in 87% of the cases; they got them for about 80% of the *total* deaths, though when they asked for certificates, they got them about 90% of the time.

They surveyed 1840 *households*, covering 12801 people.

As for the rest of you:

The methodology is the standard; they took samples from 47 distinct locations in Iraq, with the locations determined by population density. They avoided the most dangerous of locations, meaning that, if a place was too dangerous to visit (and thus, likely had a higher death rate), it wasn’t included in the study. They grabbed clusters of populations from those 47 locations, and had a 98% response rate (actually, a little higher), and nearly 80% of the deaths were documented with death certificates. (501 out of 629)

Using the 629 deaths to determine the deaths per thousand people per year, and extending that to the rest of of the population is standard, and is expected (both mathematically, and via real world experience) to yield good results. Not perfect results, but good ones.

Though they give a large range of possible deaths, one telling point is that, if the percentage of deaths was significantly lower, then it would have been nearly impossible to find 12801 people who could account for 629 deaths in their immediate households.

As for what determines the success or failure of a mission, if you don’t count the suffering of people as a cost of the war, then you’re completely ignoring the moral issues surrounding warfare. Of course, some of you proudly think that the total extermination of Iraqis, some 99.9% of whom are not dangerous to us, would solve something, so I suppose it’d be surprising to be unconcerned with the moral issues.

Nevertheless, one is, in fact, supposed to count the damage done with the objectives accomplished. To have killed 650,000 people, without eliminating any meaningful threat to the United States, would clearly show that the moral cost was much too high.

Yes, I know, “but everybody except George W. Bush thought the evidence of WMDs was solid!” That’s not true; a lot of people thought it was sketchy, but when “The Decider” himself said that he thought it was pretty weak, and had to be convinced by – gasp! – Tenet’s claim that it was a “slam dunk”, he should have used his authority as President to start looking deeper. After all, what kind of Christian wants to see innocent people die for no good reason?

As for those complaining that it would be hundreds a day (one person claims 770 a day, a number I’m sure was researched by looking it up in someone else’s blog), if 800 people died in a day, and it took ten people to take care of each body, it would take what percentage of Iraq’s population to take care of all of the bodies for that day?

.033%. That’s one third, of one tenth, of one percent. One part in 3000. If, for some ridiculous reason, they all took turns with “body detail”, then in one year, about 12% of the population would have been involved in taking care of one body each, if 800 people died every single day.

So, no, the absolute numbers of daily deaths would not necessarily raise any sustained alarms. It wouldn’t even necessarily make people realize just how many people are dying, because while the extra deaths are 1/40th of all of Iraq, it was spread out over 40 months (3 1/3rd years).

But, if you’d rather look away and insist it’s all bull, hey, go ahead. Just remember, if it turned out that there were no problems with the study, someday, someone’s going to ask you in a stunned voice why you didn’t take it seriously, nearly 2/3rds of a million dead people who posed no threat to you.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d be embarrassed as hell to have to admit “well, I thought it couldn’t be true, so I didn’t bother to research the matter, I just said it was wrong.”

Longhairedweirdo starts off with the a priori assumption that Iraq was no threat, again and again the liberal mind proves itself impossible of actually grasping the realities of the world situation. Regardless of the study’s accuracy, when you insist on being blinded to the reality of the magnitude of the threat Iraq under Hussein really presented to not only the US but the world at large and the surrounding countries in particular, nothing else you say can be given any credibility.

Just goes to show ya Weirdo, the reason I don’t trust the liberal news or liberal polling is cuz we have been lied to so many times in the past. I appreciate your assistance in explaining it all to me, but your conclusion is quite insulting. But like a good lib you over look a few, well lets face you overlooked alot of things.

1) We have found WMD’s in Iraq, ohhh yeah they weren’t the big nuclear kind, but they were something just as dangerous, and easier to manufacture mass quantities.

2) Saddam’s terrorist ties, the people of Israel are much safer now than when Sadamn was paying suicidal jihadists 25,000.00 for blowing themselves up in pizza resturants.

3) Saddamn people aren’t getting fed to paper shredders or wood chippers or their daughters aren’t being raped by this man’s insane sons.

4) Sadamn had attacked many of his neighbors, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran.

5) The corruption of the Iraq government, i.e. the Oil for Palaces program. How many Iraqi’s were starved so that Sadamn could have 80 palaces??

6) The mass genocide of the people who desired a change in the government, or shall I dare call them, The True Freedom Fighters. How many vilages were wiped out because a few in that vilage wanted to end Sadamn’s tyranical dictatorship.

Weirdo, please don’t insult my Christian sensibilities with your judgement, when you don’t even understand the reasons we are there. Trust me, I consider the death of innocent Iraqis to be extremely tragic. I do not in anyway dismiss their suffering, which I am well aware goes on, after all the MSM makes sure to inform me every night that someone has died in Iraq. But, I just have no trust for libs or anything the espouse. Which you reinforce with the condesension in your conclusion. Thanks tho – Lorica

Lon haired, and Engineeer and brad, See, the problem with this study is it brings out commenters like Engineer.

People die of all sorts of things. 41,000 in this country last year due to car accidents. Many more due to lung cancer (is there none in Iraq), more for knives, heart disease, natural causes, bowel problems, drowning, guns, drugs, etc.

Engineer and other leftists (I’m biting my tongue here from name calling) but I am generalizing will draw the conclusion incorrectly that it is due to cluster bombs, American guns killing them, etc. etc.

You guys need some SERIOUS SERIOUS HELP. There may have been that many deaths in those years but the sampling of America will show a higher number than 655,000 (yes we have closer to 300 million people not 24 million but you guys want to claim some superiority with numbers when you can’t do so ECONOMICALLY speaking. You don’t get it. You have a LACK OF PERSPECTIVE. You can’t get it right. You are full of hate and will twist the logic as opposed to doing the due diligence of getting it right.

Trust me I know. I was a liberal in 1991. It’s ok. You can after doing due diligence heal yourselves from this disease.

The Body Count has it MORE accurately even though they are inflated numbers EVEN STILL for what Engineer is saying.

What a sad sorry bunch. I can only hope that your misinformation does not influence this election. Elections have been close over the years and it has been gradually growing in favor of conservatives over the years due to AM radio and the Internet (no longer a monopoly of info by ABC, CBS, CNN and Wash PO and NY T)

Thank heavens for alternative information sources and different perspectives. This country will hopefully be governed by centrists (even though Republicans have been elected this country has been governed slight left of center still as it has for 6 decades).

One thing this report does is lump in every death for whatever cause of whatever group. It does not even attempt to distinguish between people who were killed while perpetrating violence on others, people who by and large are dead entirely because of their own actions, if they’d just stayed home and minded their own business they’d be alive. Insurgents, home grown or foreign, are treated the same way as their victims and added to the list. The proponents of this study may not be able to distinguish between the insurgents and their victims, but there is a difference. By their standards, if 100 insrugents go out and attack and kill 100 innocent victims, and get killed by the Iraqi police, that’s 200 “innocent” victims killed by the evil Americans. If the insurgents keep blowing up water treatment plants and 100 Iraqi children tragically die of dysentery, that’s again the fault of the Americans.

Add to that the fact that they do not differentiate between combat related deaths and natural causes, but seem to assume that natural causes are actually caused by the Americans, again. The purpose of this report is solely to attempt to influence US elections and paint the US as responsible for every single death in the country, and even then their methodology is suspect. Claiming that “this is how these studies are done” and proving that the study was done correctly from a mathematical and procedural view are two entirely different things.

Once again, we see the same complete lack of skepticism that the left uses on such things as global warming studies, if it supports their belief, they accept it without question, whereas if it doesn’t, they’ll disbelieve rational facts and analyses no matter how convincing the proof. Gullible is a good word to describe them.

You said it better Sev. I need to relax a little as these people just are pushing my buttons lately with their a) deliberate lying or b) denseness

I wonder if 2% of Americans died in the last 3 years. I’d venture to say EVERY country’s death rate is close to 2% in every 3 year period. I had my best friend and love of my life die July 8th this year. I blame Bush and the American soldiers!

Very sorry to hear about your loss Bak, my condolences and sympathy. It’s never easy to lose a friend or loved one. I can also fully understand your lack of tolerance for this kind of nonsense, I’m growing less and less tolerant of it. After 6 years of constant, non-stop lunacy and idiotic statements and theories and BS from the left my patience has worn very very thin.

If you use the US death rate from 1996 (latest statistic I could find easily on the US CDC site (872 per 100,000 people per year), and extrapolate that to a population of 25 million, over a period of 3 years, you get a total of 654,000 deaths. And that’s for a country that is at peace internally and has state of the art medical facilities and clean air and water. Even if this study is accurate, that means the Iraqi’s have double the death rate that the US has, which considering the medical and health challenges alone is hardly surprising, let alone if you add in the sectarian and insurgent based violence.

I hadn’t done this calculation before, but after doing it, even if the study is correct I get a big yawn “so what.” Tragic that so many die, but not what you’d call an unexpected number if you analyze it. But there’s the rub, the authors of this study undoubtedly know this, but they count on the usual hysterical liberal response to numbers and know no one will stop to examine this more thoroughly before screaming bloody murder and hopefully, from their perspective, voting against the Republicans.

It’s the same BS as when the speed limit/anti-car zealots shriek “40,000 people were killed on the highways last year, the speed limit being raised kills!” When you point out that that number of people, normalized to deaths per 100,000 vehicle miles driven, is the lowest rate ever on the US roads, and significantly lower than when the 55 mph speed limit was in effect, they come back with the same shriek “but 40,000 people were killed that’s 4000 more than last year!!!” When you point out that that’s a 10% increase, and 20% more vehicle miles were driven (not precise numbers but chosen for an example, the real numbers are similar) they come back with “But 40,000 people DIED!” It’s pure emotional bunk from people who have no capability to think rationally or logically, and yet they want to be in charge of government during what is arguably the most dangerous time in any of our lives.

To add, perhaps not double, I haven’t been able to find in all the bleating any estimate of how many were “supposed” to die in Iraq in 3 years so the figure may be even less dire than presented. If normal Iraqi predictions said 1.2 million would have died if nothing “bad” had happened, then the figure is even less surprising and less relevant. At any rate, when examined fully this is hardly a reason to whine and moan.

Sev severized me by writing, “If you use the US death rate from 1996 (latest statistic I could find easily on the US CDC site (872 per 100,000 people per year), and extrapolate that to a population of 25 million, over a period of 3 years, you get a total of 654,000 deaths. And that’s for a country that is at peace internally and has state of the art medical facilities and clean air and water.

Gosh darn statistics… Too bad the media can’t do their darn jobs and do what you just did. They become more IRRELEVANT everyday!!!!

HOWEVER, Sev wrote, “Even if this study is accurate, that means the Iraqi’s have double the death rate that the US has,”

Maybe I didn’t read things right but I thought the study was for a 3 year period. Your numbers are for a 1 year period. That means the U.S has a 50% higher death rate. No?

Oh. I just saw your second comment. You figured it out. Darn liberals and their methods of madness and accusations and attacks…. Us laymen can shred their arguments and trained journalists are snookered…

Sev wrote, “and yet they want to be in charge of government during what is arguably the most dangerous time in any of our lives. ”

Please don’t let that happen people. Vote for conservatives…. Conservatives are centrists on the political scale and have quite a bit more perspective than liberals.

No, if you take the US death rate and apply it over three years to a 25 million people population like Iraq, you’d expect 650K total deaths, more or less. Even if Iraq’s death rate was the same as the US, and as the authors of this study state an additional 650K people died, that would mean a doubling of the death rate, which is not that hard to imagine given the issues Iraq has. But, I haven’t managed to find in any article yet exactly how many Iraqi’s would have been expected to die in a “normal” 3 year period (if Iraq under Hussein could ever be qualified as being “normal” with the mass graves and such). It’s highly possible that the normal Iraqi death rate is significantly higher than ours, if it were double, that’d make the increase a 50% increase, even less of an increase. I also suspect that there are interesting things to be discovered in the death rates before and after the imposition of UN sanctions, were the death rates before, when Hussein was free to murder and kill at will higher or lower than after the sanctions and no-fly zones? The sanctions undoubtedly raised the death rate, as dictators care little or nothing about their people, and will divert humanitarian aid to building palaces instead of feeding people, but then the no-fly zones prevented him from killing the Shia and Kurdish populations using helicopters and aircraft and limited his ability to operate in these areas, so it’s hard to tell.

I’ve seen reference to this study being conducted in mid 05, which would make it 2 years, which by my initial calculations would result in about 420,000 expected deaths using the US rate, and before anyone starts screaming that 650 is higher than 420 take a look at the confidence bounds, and the lower one is around 450K.

This whole thing, like most of the things the left screams about, is a tempest in a teapot even if the study is accurate. And remember, the study lumps in all deaths, a dubious decision at best, and grossly overstates the deaths according to what the Iraqi’s themselves are saying.

In a country that is has massive insurgency, ongoing military operations, food and water distribution problems, no infrastructure (it had little enough before the war), and sweltering temperatures that promote disease, this all isn’t that surprising. Most countries out there outside the industrial world have significantly higher death rates than the US does.

“The descrepancy is that the Liberal lap dog press and SP’s like longz are lumping in the piles of mass graves uncovered since the days of Hussein. If you subtract those out, some graves with as many as 4000+ bodies, knowing how long it went on and on, the 400,000 figure doesn’t leave enough to count the few that we’ve been responsiple for in the war.”

This isn’t even close to reality. I suspect that this came directly out of the posters ass. I mean, you really have to be an idiot to just make something ilke that up and post it because you wish it were true.

READ THE STUDY, bother to understand it, and you’ll see they didn’t do what you describe but did do a very good job picking representative clusters and extrapolating with care.

If you wish to refute the numbers, produce your own peer-reviewed study with data freely available to the public, as these folks have, or provide a reasoned critique of, not the methods, but the collection of data. (the methods are solid…the only issue is whether the data used is statistically valid – and noone has shown any reason it isn’t)

Sister said:
“I don’t measure the success or failure of a war in terms of number of casualties.”

If your only remaining justification for war is to free the Iraqi people from the brutalities of their dictator, then I would expect that there are a certain number of casualties that would have made the war “not worth it” … at least in terms of trying to prevent suffering.

No one is saying that these numbers mean we should cut and run… they are just one more reason why our invasion has not been succuesful based on the stated goals of our invasion.

We all know Iraq is [edited – ST] at this point…how [edited – ST] is besides the point, because the basic disagreement comes down to whether the war is un-[edited – ST]. If there’s nothing we can do to fix things (or if our presence makes it worse), it’s hard to argue that we should stay.

So chill out righties, you’ve already admitted in this thread that it doesn’t matter to you that 655,000 are dead…why dispute the number then? Oh, because it shows what a mistake this was in the first place? you’re just going to have to deal with that reality becoming more and more apparent, with more and more revelations and studies…

Its 655,000 additional deaths. Determined by calculating the death rate before and after the invasion, in a study, not a survey.

The “confidence intervals you could drive a truck through” hold that the minimum # of deaths is ~400K, maximim ~800K. It would be disingenuous to quote a figure at the high or low end, so the quote the figure in the middle. Even if the numbers are at the low end, that’s still 400K. Nothing disingenuous here.

“The average leftist dolt on the street thinks now that we’ve killed or that we + insurgents have killed 655,000 Iraqi civilians. Why? Because leftism has a problem with reality. Clarity is the enemy of the left. So is perspectiveâ€¦..”

The average rightists dolt thinks mao killed 10 million…when it was really poverty and starvation due to his policies. But does it really matter? I think not.

If your only remaining justification for war is to free the Iraqi people from the brutalities of their dictator, then I would expect that there are a certain number of casualties that would have made the war “not worth it” â€¦ at least in terms of trying to prevent suffering.

You really should see a shrink about this amazing fetish you have for straw men.

Aghast twisted and lied by saying, “So chill out righties, you’ve already admitted in this thread that it doesn’t matter to you that 655,000 are deadâ€¦”

No. That’s not what we were saying. Please apologize for misstating what we’ve said. We have said repeatedly that every death is a tragedy, unfortunate, and we wish they didn’t happen. Utopia would be great. But the mark of a successful war is winning. This is why we consider WW2, WW1 and the civil war successes even though the very tragic loss of millions of lives. It is because we won. Good triumphed over evil. It’d be quite a different America and world if we said at a certain number of lives we give up and surrender. Now you can stop lying about us and stop cussing and start gaining perspective I hope.

Aghast you are so wrong. What kind of asinine stupidity is this comment.

The average rightists dolt thinks mao killed 10 millionâ€¦when it was really poverty and starvation due to his policies. But does it really matter? I think not.

Soooo Bush is reponsible for all the evil in the world due to his policies, but Mao isn’t. LOL And you think we are idiots???

Then there is this from your 2 separate posts:

Its 655,000 additional deaths. Determined by calculating the death rate before and after the invasion, in a study, not a survey.

Additional as in Not War Casualties?? Or Additional as in Extra War Casualties??? Hello?? Didn’t Longz just tell us that this was not about the war??? Sooo why do you individuals continue to say these causualties are due to the war, or is it additional casualties?? I agree with Sev, when you get to a point let us know.

And now this:

We all know Iraq is [edited. –ST] at this pointâ€¦how [edited – ST] is besides the point, because the basic disagreement comes down to whether the war is un-[edited–ST]. If there’s nothing we can do to fix things (or if our presence makes it worse), it’s hard to argue that we should stay.

You lowlifes have been saying that Iraq is in a civil war for a year now. We are still waiting. Or is it you just hoping it turns into a civil war. Yet we are the blood thirsty ones. Clue if you need some money let me know, and I can help you buy one. But then again, according to the “study” this isn’t about war deaths, just deaths in general. So why pick Iraq??? Why not pick Mexico? This whole study is a political hack job in the hopes to influence the elections.

The logic used by the left grows so tiresome. It’s not about the war, it’s about the deaths the war has caused. Drum Roll Please!!!! And the difference is???? You all come in here with your confused logic and blast out some stupidity then go look at me, I am so much smarter than everyone else. It is going to be so amazing to see your reaction once the Reps cement their majority come November. – Lorica

The logic used by the left grows so tiresome. It’s not about the war, it’s about the deaths the war has caused. Drum Roll Please!!!! And the difference is????

The leftists are a trip aren’t they Lorica? The same people who want to parse everything negative to them to the point of splitting hairs with a laser, as in “Abramoff didn’t give money to Democrats, he only told others to give money to Democrats,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” and “They only enriched uranium, we only told them not to enrich plutonium so they didn’t cheat!” are the ones who get all sloppy with their logic when it’s in their interest, “This isn’t about the war it’s about the deaths!”

Just more examples of the hypocrisy of the left, the people who believe in free speech for themselves but not for others. And these are the idiots who have the nerve to claim that the Republicans are bringing us closer to an Orwellian nightmare.

—The Hopkins team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion at 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people, comparing it with their post-invasion average of 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people a year. The difference between these two rates is the rate of “excess deaths;” the deaths occurring from violence is how they get to the 600,000 number.

The entire “context” then, hinges on the validity of the pre-war mortality rate. If you accept this number, then I’m told you accept that pre-war Iraq had a better mortality rate than any other country in the Middle East, even Israel.

OK. ONe more money paragraph:

But back to that U.N. number, 100 deaths a day in August. The Hopkins study suggests that the number of deaths not just this August, but every month since March 2003, is five times larger. Given that the level of violence we are witnessing today is at or near its peak, and given that for periods of time between May 2003 and April 2004, the violence had not yet gotten out of control, in order to get to the Hopkins numbers, one would have to see even significantly higher numbers in recent months than 500 daily deaths to “average” out to 500 deaths overall.

Is it possible that the U.N. is not seeing four out of every five Iraqis who is dying, even today?

Indicates a death rate for the US of 816.7 per 100,000, or 8.16 per 1000. Are we to grant any credibility to a purported death rate for Iraq of 5.5 per 1000, that would put the US at a 48% higher death rate than that in Iraq under the loving mercies of Saddam? If it really is 13.3 per 1000 in Iraq, that’s 64% higher than in the US, which even if it is true doesn’t sound that high for a country with little to no medical infrastructure in the middle of a violent insurgency. In reality it’s probably less, and even if it isn’t it’s not that huge a difference in rates even without the armed insurrection going on, and one that would be easily explained by population demographics and medical/health care differences.

The people pushing this story are counting on no one taking the time to look at this carefully, which when you’re dealing with the MSM is probably a safe assumption, but c’mon, don’t piss on our heads and tell us it’s raining!

No, if you take the US death rate and apply it over three years to a 25 million people population like Iraq, you’d expect 650K total deaths, more or less. Even if Iraq’s death rate was the same as the US, and as the authors of this study state an additional 650K people died, that would mean a doubling of the death rate, which is not that hard to imagine given the issues Iraq has. But, I haven’t managed to find in any article yet exactly how many Iraqi’s would have been expected to die in a “normal” 3 year period (if Iraq under Hussein could ever be qualified as being “normal” with the mass graves and such).

Iraq, being a significantly younger nation – that is, one with a younger populace – than the US is expected to have a much lower death rate. The death rate found – not assumed, but found – by the researchers was in line with CIA estimates, the previous study, and other estimates for similar nations under similar situations.

You’d have discovered this if you’d read the study, rather than making stuff up to use to try to discredit it.

As a side note, I do have to admit I found your claim that I didn’t understand the world because I saw Iraq as no significant threat to be amusing, though.

Before the war, we had 5,000 people in Saudi Arabia to keep the threat contained. Did we have more people over there, on aircraft carriers, maybe? Let’s say it was 20,000 people, just to be safe.

Now, in order to keep us safe, we need 150,000. No, wait… we have 150,000, but it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to bring about stability.

And you’re saying that then, the threat is greater than it is now.

Ah, never mind, I’m sure you’ll brush this off as more liberal lies. I’m sure we had more people, and were spending more money, patrolling the no-fly zones before we invaded than we have occupying Iraq now.

Long hairs got in the way of him reading my 10/13 4:37 post:
Let’s repeat a key paragraph:
—The Hopkins team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion at 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people, comparing it with their post-invasion average of 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people a year. The difference between these two rates is the rate of “excess deaths;” the deaths occurring from violence is how they get to the 600,000 number.

The entire “context” then, hinges on the validity of the pre-war mortality rate. If you accept this number, then I’m told you accept that pre-war Iraq had a better mortality rate than any other country in the Middle East, even Israel.